This invention relates to a cutter wheel for use in a glass cutter or a glass cutting device for cutting a glass plate or a liquid crystal plate.
In order to cut, either manually or automatically, various glass plates such as those used in cars, buildings and industries, glass plates, ceramic glass plates and liquid crystal plates, a glass cutter having a cutter wheel rotatably mounted on the tip of a head member is used to form a slit on the surface of the plate by pressing the wheel against the plate and rolling it thereon. Then, by pushing down the plate on both sides of the slit, the plate can be cut along the slit.
A conventional cutter wheel of this type is a disk member having a cutting edge along its outer periphery and formed with a circular mounting hole extending therethrough at its center. The cutter wheel is rotatably mounted to the head member of the glass cutter by a mounting shaft, which has a circular section and is inserted through the circular mounting hole.
For the cutting of liquid crystal plates, hard glass plates and ceramic glass plates, high degrees of accuracy in straightness and perpendicularity of the cut surface are required. To meet this requirement, it is necessary to form a slit that is sufficiently smooth, straight and deep. To form a deep slit, the wheel has to penetrate deep into the glass plate. However, none of the conventional cutter wheels can form such a deep slit because the mounting shaft and the mounting hole are both circular in section, and thus the wheel rolls smoothly on the glass plate without penetrating. Since the slit is shallow, it is difficult to form a perpendicular cut surface when the glass plate is broken along the slit.
An object of this invention is to provide a cutter wheel which can form a deep slit on an article to be cut so that the article can be broken easily along the slit and a perpendicular cut surface can be formed reliably.